So, why are so many footballers now falling into a life of crime off the pitch?

One minute your name is being chanted from the terraces, you’re treated like a celebrity wherever you go, and the phone never stops ringing with requests for interviews and public appearances. 

The next you’re loading boxes stuffed with £400,000 of dirty money into a white transit van or organising the smuggling of 60kg of cannabis across international borders and getting your girlfriend and her pal to act as drug mules.

It might sound like a particularly bad episode of a TV police drama, but these are the real-life stories of footballers who have made headlines recently after turning to crime.

Last month former Hearts and Hibs striker James Keatings, 33, appeared at Falkirk Sheriff Court where he admitted possessing and transferring criminal property in the form of 78 bundles of dirty money, totalling £390,040, which he was caught moving from his van to another van on a Wishaw street.

Earlier in the summer, former Greenock Morton player Jay Emmanuel-Thomas, 34, was jailed for four years after being found guilty of smuggling £600,000 worth of cannabis from Thailand to the UK.

Following his arrest, the Scottish club sacked Emmanuel-Thomas, who had previously played for Arsenal, Aberdeen, and England at youth level, and who had recruited his girlfriend and her pal to smuggle the Class B drug into the UK.

Keatings and Emmanuel-Thomas join the likes of former Hearts player Paul MacDonald, who was jailed in 2023 for his involvement in a drugs and money laundering operation.

Are these isolated tales of a handful of footballers gone rogue or do they point to a more widespread problem?

Jim Duffy, football coach and former Celtic and Dundee player, has seen the struggles a lot of players have adjusting to life after football. He said: ‘A young footballer at 21, 22 years old, he’s flying, he’s playing well, he’s getting good money, he’s travelling all over the world depending on the clubs.

‘Footballers get looked after really well. Even at smaller clubs they are celebrities. They are not necessarily making the really big money, but everything is done for them, and they have routine and discipline.

‘They go to a nightclub, and they don’t need to queue, they are in demand. And then all of a sudden, 10 years later, 12 years later, you take all that away and the phone stops ringing, and they can be a bit lost.

‘It’s a really difficult situation to deal with. They’ve no longer got the adrenalin rush of playing in front of a big crowd, of being on TV and getting interviewed. They’re thinking: “What do I do next? What’s my skillset? All my life, I’ve kicked a ball’. And a lot of them do struggle.’

Can Duffy see why some players turn to crime to fund lifestyles they can no longer afford? ‘You don’t know their personal circumstances, maybe something pushed them towards that side of it,’ he said, but he stressed: ‘It is a small number of footballers that get involved in it.’

Injuries and struggles with his physical and mental health saw Keatings drop down the pecking order of clubs from his start as a promising young player with Celtic, and later with Hearts and Hibs, to Hamilton, Inverness Caledonian Thistle, Raith Rovers and Forfar Athletic.

One football insider who didn’t want to be named said: ‘That takes a physical and mental toll on you and your earnings go right down and you maybe don’t have another skill set to bridge that gap. A player like Keatings might have gone from earning a high of around £3,000 or £4,000 a week to just £400 or £500 a week. He’s maybe thinking: “How do I earn more” and he makes a bad decision.’

A bad leg break in 2011 when he was playing for Carlisle United brought it home to Dumfries-born striker Rory Loy that he needed a Plan B for when his playing career came to an end. He now combines a job in sales with working as a football commentator for BBC Scotland.

‘The biggest thing in the transition from football to the real world is that as a player you become institutionalised,’ said Loy, who began his career at Rangers before being loaned to Dunfermline Athletic.

‘At Rangers you were given your breakfast, your lunch, your kit, you’re told where to be and when and what to wear, they arrange your travel and hotels. Everything is handed to you on a plate, and you’re treated like an invaluable asset. Then, after football, all that disappears overnight. But you’ve got used to making a good wage.’

Having ploughed everything into football from a young age, many players are reluctant to start over in low-paying jobs. Can Loy see why some players get tempted by crime?

‘I don’t see why someone would go down that route,’ he offered. ‘I don’t think that’s an excuse. Football set me up well, but I still need to go to work and earn money like everyone else.

‘In football, everything is backwards. You earn most of your money when you’re young, it’s not like other careers where you build up to that.

‘So, when you’re young as a footballer you can afford the really nice car, you can get on the property ladder earlier than your friends and buy the nice house, and then when you stop playing the money stops coming in just at the time your pals are maybe starting to earn a lot.’

Another issue is the public perception that footballers are rich, which leads some players to live beyond their means to keep up appearances.

‘A lot of boys don’t bother with that, but some do,’ said Loy. ‘And you get comments from people like: “Oh, you’re not a footballer anymore” which can be hard.’

Some feel the system is broken, with club academies taking in hundreds of youngsters, only a tiny number of whom will go on to become professional players. At the same time Scottish clubs are buying more players from overseas every year, meaning there are fewer opportunities for talented home-grown youngsters who have often trained four or five times a week for more than a decade.

Some academy players may have neglected their studies to focus on football and suddenly find themselves without a professional contract or qualifications or another career to fall back on.

Reflecting on the academy system, football commentator Richard Gordon said: ‘All the big clubs cast their nets as wide as they can because they don’t want to miss out on a young talent, but very few of them will make it big.’

Peterhead FC forward Cammy Smith, who began his career at Aberdeen and later moved to Dundee United, was forced to take a 50 per cent pay cut when, aged 25, he joined Partick Thistle in 2021.

He said: ‘I needed to find a way to earn a good amount and maintain the lifestyle I’d got used to. I did a property course. I wanted a way to build income so that when my playing career finished, I didn’t need to go out and rush into a career as a delivery driver.’

Smith set up Pitch2Property, a property investment company, with Peterhead team-mate Peter Pawlett and together they offer advice to other players looking to do the same. Smith now owns 23 properties and is still playing football part-time.

Players like Keatings and Emmanuel-Thomas who have hit rock bottom might look to David Martindale, whose journey from convicted criminal to manager at Livingston FC is one of the most inspiring reinventions in Scottish football history.

Martindale, who never played football professionally before becoming a manager, was jailed for four years in 2006 after becoming involved in organised crime including money laundering and the large-scale supply of cocaine.

After his release from prison, Martindale got a degree in construction project management from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh and, after years volunteering for Livingston while the club struggled financially, he was appointed manager in 2020.

Speaking back in 2020 about his own brush with crime, Martindale said: ‘My motivation was financial, purely greed. I grew up in housing schemes. You aspire to be the guy driving the BMW or the Range Rover; you don’t want to be the guy constantly in and out of work struggling to meet his rent. I was guilty and the only way to put it ‘right’ — if that’s the correct word — was to take my punishment.’

Reflecting on life post-prison, he said back then: ‘There will always be obstacles, but I honestly don’t mind that. I created the obstacles. Have I got to work that bit harder than the guy who hasn’t been to prison? Probably, rightly so.’

For players who typically finish training at lunchtime and have a lot of time and money on their hands, gambling can become a problem. 

Smith said: ‘There’s a close relationship between gambling and football, whether it’s going to the bookies, the casino or playing cards for money at the back of the bus. There’s always some sort of gambling going on and it can get out of hand.’

Many within football think more needs to be done to support players with financial planning along with preparing for a future after they hang up their boots.

The independent trade union for players, the Professional Footballers’ Association Scotland (PFA Scotland), offers courses ranging from barbering, plastering and gas engineering to podcasting, barista skills and coaching courses. It also offers support for those experiencing mental health issues along with courses in financial literacy and gambling awareness, though take-up rates can be low.

Chris Higgins, player services manager with PFA Scotland, said: ‘If you are earning great money, it can be hard to manage that transition for what comes next. We want to encourage players to consider it before they get to that transition and the point where they are retiring from football, and we are here to help players in all areas of life.’

Appearing in court earlier this year, Emmanuel-Thomas’s barrister said the player was tempted into crime during ‘significant financial hard times’ when out of contract, and said he struggled with his move to Scotland to play football which led him ‘to temptation and a catastrophic error of judgment.’

Sentencing Emmanuel-Thomas to four years in prison, the judge had little sympathy, telling the player: ‘It is through your own actions you will no longer be known as a professional footballer; you will be known as a criminal. A professional footballer who threw it all away.’